TerraPower Wins First NRC Reactor Construction Permit in a Decade, Advancing Natrium Project in Wyoming

New updates have been reported about TerraPower.

TerraPower secured a pivotal milestone this week as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved its construction permit for a Natrium advanced nuclear reactor adjacent to a retiring coal plant in Wyoming, marking the first such U.S. authorization in nearly 10 years and the first non–water-cooled commercial reactor approval in more than four decades. The 345-megawatt sodium-cooled plant, developed with GE Vernova Hitachi, is designed to be smaller than conventional gigawatt-scale reactors yet significantly larger than most small modular concepts, positioning TerraPower to target grid-scale deployment while limiting capital intensity.

The Natrium design stores surplus heat in large molten-sodium tanks, enabling steady, high-capacity nuclear operation while shifting output to match demand and backstop intermittent wind and solar generation, which could improve capacity factors and lower levelized costs relative to traditional nuclear. TerraPower pursued the NRC’s standard private-property licensing pathway rather than relying on recently eased Department of Energy site rules, signaling a strategy geared toward broad commercial replication and regulatory de-risking for future projects. Backed by Bill Gates and investors including Nvidia, the company has raised about $1.7 billion to date, including a $650 million round last June, as rising data center loads and policy pressure to expand firm, low-carbon power drive renewed investor interest in nuclear, which has attracted well over $1 billion for startups in recent months. Despite the momentum, TerraPower must still demonstrate that advanced designs and potential mass manufacturing can overcome nuclear’s historic cost overruns and compete with increasingly cheap renewables and storage, with meaningful cost advantages unlikely to be validated for at least a decade.